A History of Torture in Britain

Introduction

Torture is the practice of inflicting severe pain on people, either to punish them or persuade them to say or do something. Perhaps the most succinct and accurate definition of torture is still that given by Dr Johnson in his famous dictionary, which was first published in 1755. In it, he described torture as being, ‘pain by which guilt is punished or confession extorted’. Torture may be conducted as either a private enterprise or judicially, on behalf of the state. In this book, we shall be looking at the ‘official’ use of torture, sanctioned by the Crown, courts, police, army or other legal authorities in Britain and its possessions overseas. Before going any further, it might be as well to deal briefly with a widespread myth to the effect that torture has been unlawful in Britain since 1215, when it was expressly forbidden by Magna Carta. So common is this misapprehension that the matter will be dealt with in some detail in Chapter 2. For now, it is enough to say that the idea of torture being extra-judicial or outside the law of England, was not devised until the early seventeenth century, over 400 years after the drafting of Magna Carta.

Perhaps the best way to expose the mistaken notion that torture has only been practised in Britain to a limited extent and in a hole-and-corner way, in dark dungeons out of the public view, is to give some contemporary accounts of its use. The following passage, taken from The London Journal of 12 June 1731, just as the Enlightenment was gaining pace in Europe, tells of the punishment inflicted on the aptly named Japhet Crook.

Posing as ‘Sir Peter Stringer’, the elderly Crook forged documents suggesting that he owned a tract of land in Essex. He then raised a mortgage on the land. Japhet Crook was 70 years of age at this time and had carried out similar frauds for years without being caught. This time though, his luck ran out. He was arrested and brought to trial. The sentence was one of life imprisonment, but before that he was ordered to undergo public punishment. On 9 June 1731, Crook was brought from prison and set in the pillory at London’s Charing Cross. The London Journal relates what happened next:

He stood an hour thereon, after which a chair was set upon the pillory and he being put therein, the hangman with a sort of pruning knife, cut off both his ears and immediately a surgeon clapt a styptic thereon. The executioner, with a pair of scissors, cut the left nostril until it was near quite through and afterwards cut the right nostril at once. He bore all this with great patience, but when in pursuance of his sentence, the right nostril was seared with a red-hot iron, he was in such violent pain that his left nostril was let alone.

Ears cut off, nostrils slit with scissors, red-hot irons; it is difficult to know what word one could possibly apply to such horrors, other than ‘torture’. Using red-hot irons on people’s faces was a not uncommon punishment in Britain for centuries, along with mutilations, up to and including the amputation of hands and feet. One or two more examples might underline the point. In December 1655, during the time that Oliver Cromwell ruled the country, a Quaker called James Naylor fell foul of the authorities and was convicted of blasphemy. An eyewitness describes what was done to this man, whose only offence was to preach the Gospel, after he had been set in the pillory at the Royal Exchange in London;

He having stood till two, the executioner took him out, and having bound his arms with cords to the pillory, and he having put forth his tongue, which he freely did, the executioner, with a red-hot iron about the bigness of a quill, bored the same, and by order of the sheriff held it in a small place, to the end that the beholders might see and bear witness that the sentence was thoroughly executed: then having taken it out and pulled the cap off that covered his face, he put a handkerchief over his eyes, and putting his left hand to the back part of his head, and taking the red-hot iron letter in his other hand, put it to his forehead till it smoked …

The ‘red-hot iron letter’ was a ‘B’ for ‘Blasphemer’. This then was the sort of thing one was likely to suffer for holding heterodox religious beliefs during the Commonwealth. This terrible sentence may be seen being executed in Illustration 1.

Two more instances should be sufficient to show that torture was used not merely for publicly for punishment, but also to extract confessions in private. In 1546 a woman called Anne Askew was being imprisoned in London for her unorthodox religious beliefs. Unfortunately, it was the final year of Henry VIII’s reign and some people wanted to see his wife Catherine brought down. One way of doing this was to gather evidence that she was a heretic. A woman who, it was thought, might be able to supply information about the queen’s heretical leanings was a devout Protestant. Anne Askew was taken to the Tower of London and tortured so severely on the rack that her arms and legs were torn from their sockets. So badly dislocated were her limbs, that she never walked again. (Not that this proved a long-lasting handicap; she was burned at the stake a few weeks later.) There was nothing remarkable about somebody being racked in this way; it could be done by either a royal warrant or an order from the Privy Council. In the century following Anne Askew’s torture, a little over eighty warrants were issued for torture by the Tower of London’s rack.

It is true, however, that most torture carried out in England was intended as punishment, rather than for the purpose of obtaining information. Very often, as in the two first examples at which we looked, such public exhibitions involved mutilation and the use of red-hot irons. In 1581, a man called John Stubs was unwise enough to write a pamphlet which could have been seen as an attack on Elizabeth I. It was printed by William Pace and in due course, both men found themselves in court. The law was quite clear, that those who insulted the monarch in this way were liable to lose their hands for it. On a scaffold in Westminster, both John Stubs and William Pace had their right hands removed by the simple expedient of placing a butcher’s cleaver over the wrist and striking it very hard with a mallet. The stump was then cauterized with a red-hot iron. An example of how this sort of mutilation was carried out may be seen in Illustration 2.

The truth is that torture is as British as cricket or crumpets. It was used from the country’s earliest recorded history, both as punishment and also to compel suspected criminals to speak, and its use continued well into the modern period. As late as 1976, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Britain had been torturing suspects in Northern Ireland. This is no mere historical curiosity!

In the first chapter, we shall examine the origin of the use of torture in England and see how it was used, particularly in the interrogation of those suspected of religious dissent or treason. Mention of torture in this country automatically summons up images of the rack and it is interesting to note that this archetypal instrument of English torture was in use for only a century or so, and that only one rack was operating in the whole country during that time.

Chapter 1

The Use of Torture for Interrogation in Medieval and Tudor England

In the Introduction, we looked at the two different types of judicial torture, that used to extract information and the kind designed simply to inflict pain upon the victim as punishment. Both were being used in the British Isles as far back as recorded history stretches. To explore this idea further, we must, for a short while, abandon our use of the word ‘torture’ and consider the actual nature of the activity, regardless of what name may be used to describe it. Let us look first at the notion of inflicting severe pain on a suspect as a method of uncovering the truth about a supposed crime, what most people today mean when they talk of ‘torture’.

The practice of using an ‘ordeal’ to establish the innocence or guilt of an accused person was widely used in Britain from the Anglo-Saxon period onwards. By the time of the Norman Conquest, this was the accepted method used to investigate crime and bring perpetrators to justice. The Church was inextricably linked with the practice of trial by ordeal, which meant by implication that it was sanctioned by God himself. The custom of the ordeal was prescribed by law and in many, perhaps most, cases, was the only way of finding out if somebody had committed a crime. Without a police force, unless the criminal was actually caught in the act it was all but impossible to pin the crime on a suspect after the event. The ordeal was essentially a religious process, the discovery of truth by divine revelation, rather than by the examination of evidence.

A century after the invasion of England by William the Conqueror, the ordeal was codified in the Assize of Clarendon, which was an attempt by Henry II to bring all the laws of England into one unified and recognized framework. The Assize of Clarendon was a meeting over which Henry II presided in 1166 and it was held at the royal hunting lodge at Clarendon Palace in Wiltshire. The intention was to create a legal system for England which was to be brought under the king’s control, thus limiting the power of the barons in the process. The idea was to discourage any of the barons from imposing their own ideas of law and order and to acknowledge the supremacy of the king and his laws. One section of the Assize of Clarendon talked of how to deal with, ‘. . . any man who is accused or believed to be a robber, murderer, thief or receiver of robbers or thieves since the King’s succession’. It went on to say that, ‘Those thus identified shall be put to the ordeal of water . . .’ At roughly the same time, Ranulph de Glanvill produced his monumental work on the law of England, Tractatus de legibus et consuetudinibus regni Anglie, which translates roughly as ‘The Treatise on the Laws and Customs of the Kingdom of England’. He described how a suspected criminal must be, ‘made to purge himself by ordeal’.

What were these ordeals which were used to determine the innocence or guilt of those accused of robbery, murder and so on? Three types of ordeal had been in use for centuries and were by 1166 an integral part of the English judicial process. These were the ordeal by cold water, ordeal by hot water and the ordeal by hot iron. All were injurious to the victims and could even result in death.

The ordeal by hot iron was perhaps the most painful and harmful of the three methods. It entailed the suspected criminal being made either to walk nine paces holding a red-hot iron bar or to walk blindfolded and barefoot across nine red-hot iron ploughshares, laid on the floor of the church. Illustration 3 shows a man being handed a red-hot iron bar. He is being supported and will be helped to take nine strides across the floor of the church. We remember once more, the claim that English law has never countenanced the use of torture! By any definition, making somebody hold a piece of red-hot metal or place their feet on it would surely count as torture. A historical instance of how the ordeal by hot iron worked in practice may be of interest.

Edward the Confessor was the penultimate Anglo-Saxon king of England, ruling from 1044 to 1066. According to tradition, his mother Emma of Normandy, the former Queen of England, was accused of having an affair with the Bishop of Winchester. To establish her innocence or guilt, she was compelled to undergo the ordeal of hot iron. Nine flat blades from ploughs, each about the size of a modern-day laptop computer, were made red-hot in a brazier and laid on the floor of the nave of Winchester Cathedral. The former queen was blindfolded and then forced to walk over the hot pieces of iron. Legend has it that after she had completed the ordeal, Emma asked if they would soon reach the red-hot ploughshares. She had not even noticed walking over them and her feet were quite unharmed. This proved her innocence of the accusation made against her.

This then was the essence of trial by ordeal, that God would protect the innocent from harm. For most of those undergoing the ordeal by hot iron or hot water the results would not have been so clear-cut and obvious as they were when Emma of Normandy was put to the test. The usual procedure was that after the person had held or walked on the red-hot iron, the affected area would be bandaged and then examined three days later in the presence of a priest, who would be the final arbiter. If the wound was discoloured or oozing pus, then it meant that God had not acted to protect the person subject to the ordeal. If, on the other hand, the burns or scalds were healing well and the flesh looked healthy, then this was a sign of grace, that the Lord was showing that the individual concerned had been telling the truth.

The ordeal of hot water entailed heating a pot of water, or sometimes oil, until it was boiling and then requiring the accused person to plunge in his or her hand and retrieve a stone or other object which lay at the bottom of the pot. For less serious offences, the arm would only have to be immersed up to the wrist, but for cases of robbery or murder, a deeper vessel was used, which required the person to reach into the boiling liquid until the whole arm up to the elbow was scalded. Sometimes, the pain was such that the stone could not be picked up. In those cases, the ordeal had to be repeated until this was achieved.

Those faced with the ordeal could of course refuse to take part, but this was regarded as being tantamount to an admission of guilt and might consequently result in immediate execution for whatever crime was being investigated. There was also the possibility of confessing and admitting the offence. Honestly and penitence of this kind might lead to a reduced sentence. The ordeal was really no more than a session of torture, designed to discover the truth about an alleged crime.

The final type of ordeal was that of cold water. This entailed the accused being tied up and dropped into a body of cold water such as a pond or lake. The guilty person would be rejected by the water and so float; the innocent would sink and then be rescued and acquitted of the charge against them. We shall look more closely at this ordeal in Chapter 3, when we examine the activities of Matthew Hopkins, the so-called ‘Witchfinder General’. We can see a woman being put to the ordeal of cold water in Illustration 4.

There were several problems with the trial by ordeal. One was that judging if a burn or scald was healing well was a purely subjective matter and a priest could be mistaken or even bribed. It also left the administration of justice in the hands of the Church, rather than the Crown, something which monarchs found a little irksome at times. Other difficulties with judging innocence or guilt in this way included the disconcerting, but irrefutable, fact that it ran counter to Scripture. There are a number of Biblical prohibitions against enlisting the aid of the Deity in determining innocence or guilt in this way. The Old Testament book of Deuteronomy, for instance, advises that, ‘You shall not put the LORD your God to the test’, an injunction repeated by Jesus. These reservations led in 1215 to the Pope forbidding priests from taking any further part in trials by ordeal. That this prohibition came in the same year that King John set his seal to Magna Carta has led to some confusion, in that it has been thought that the abolition of trial by ordeal was somehow associated with Magna Carta. It was not.

It was abandoning the traditional ordeal as a method for deciding guilt which led subsequently to the extensive use of torture in Europe to force confessions from those accused of crimes. This was due to a fundamental difference in the legal systems of England and other countries in Europe. Throughout most of Europe, conviction for a crime could only, by tradition, happen if there were either two eyewitnesses to the crime or a confession by the perpetrator. Circumstantial evidence was judged to be insufficient. Since few murderers are careless enough to kill their victims while people are watching and most will not shrink at perjury after having committed murder, without torture to force a confession, criminals in mainland Europe would have been unlikely ever to be convicted of anything at all.

In England, circumstantial evidence and the word of witnesses about the character of the accused person were all admissible in court. It was for this reason, rather than any delicacy and squeamishness on the part of the English at that time, that torture was not routinely used as an aid in law enforcement the way that it was in France and Germany, for instance. There was another reason to use torture sparingly and this was a practical point which the English grasped, but which was perhaps neglected in most of continental Europe. Over 2,000 years ago, during the time of the Roman Empire, it was known by thoughtful people that torture was not a very efficient way of establishing the truth. Both Cicero and Tacitus observed that torture was just as likely to bring forth falsehood as it was truth. People will say literally anything to avoid extreme pain. They are especially likely to say what the questioner wishes to hear.

Modern research in the fields of trauma and neuroscience confirm precisely what was said by those writers of classical antiquity, about torture being as likely to produce fantasy and lies as it is to reveal the truth. Suffering and stress, the very things which torture is designed to produce, distort perception, disrupt the process of coherent and orderly thinking and cause the subject to generate unreliable narratives and false memories. The more severe the pain and the more prolonged the ordeal, the less likely are the statements wrung from the individual to be accurate and veridical.

In Scotland, where torture was always far more freely used than it was in England, this tendency was very noticeable. An instance of its use in that country will illustrate why evidence obtained in this way is all too often completely worthless. In November 1589, King James VI of Scotland, later to be James I of England, was hoping to sail to Norway to meet up with the 16-year-old girl whom he was scheduled to marry. Unfortunately, the North Sea can be stormy and rough at that time of year and twice he was forced to postpone the crossing. The king got it into his head that the inclement weather must be caused by witchcraft and when he returned to his own country, he started an investigation. More than that, he personally supervised the torture of those accused of causing the foul weather.

One of the first people to be arrested was Agnes Sampson and she naturally denied all knowledge of causing the North Sea to be choppy. The Scots had always been keener on and more ingenious in their use of torture than the English. A rope was twisted round Agnes Sampson’s head and then twisted very tight. This is a most agonising experience and she soon changed her tune and began desperately trying to find things to say which would stop any further torture. One of the first things she admitted to was causing a storm at sea, but this was not sufficient. She said to the king, who was present during her torment, ‘It was me who called the maelstrom to your ship after your marriage. I cast a cat into the sea with parts of a dead body to raise a storm.’

This was a promising beginning, but those interrogating her knew that there must be more to it than that. They turned the rope around her head even tighter, until Agnes Sampson was almost incoherent with pain. Then she came